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Monday, March 24, 2014

Bureaucracy Quotes Collection

A few choice quotes on the magic of bureaucracy. It’s somewhat reassuring to remember that many others have endured the pain of having to deal with bureaucrats, and here are their thoughts. Take solace in schadenfreude!

I thought about publishing this as a separate page, but unfortunately, I got an error every time I attempted to publish it.

Bear in mind that these are the sorts of people whose sense of achievement is measured in reams of paper and time wasted.

Dawson: I'm glad to see the Ministry's continuing its tradition of recruiting the brightest and best, sir.

Sam Lowry: Thank you, Dawson.

— Brazil

I can't harbor a fugitive, I'm an un-elected official!

— Nessarose, Wicked

They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy - not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's entry on Vogons

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

— The Secret People by G. K. Chesterton

Dr. McCoy: The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.

— Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

I like bats much better than bureaucrats.

—C. S. Lewis

The junior Mr Popplewick is not permitted to expect anyone.

—Doctor Who, "Trial of a Time Lord"

The Doctor: Is there no way to expedite the procedure?

Mr. Popplewick: [Outraged] Expedite?! I am a senior clerk, sir. To me the procedure is sacrosanct! My work is a celebration of all that is perfect! Why speed perfection?!

The Doctor: Because your employer wants me dead.

Mr. Popplewick: ... You seem to have found the one little weakness in our procedure, sir.

— Doctor Who, "Trial of a Time Lord"

I really don't like that dude. He's an ass-hole.

—Robert Epps, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, sums up Galloway in short order

All the documents must be signed.Seas go dry and suns grow cold,But all the documents must be signed,And don't forget that questionnaires must be answered.Love may die and truth grow old, butEv'ry questionnaire must be answered.One must have one's papers.

—The Secretary harmonizing in sixths with Vera Boronel, The Consul

Coop: Road test? Me? But I've got to go save the world!DMV Desk Clerk: If I started making exceptions, this whole place would fall apart.Coop: * grumbles* I'll give ya "fall apart".

—Megas XLR

Bureaucracy...now that is inherently evil. Worse still, it's hard to pin it on any particular bureaucrat.

—Reverend Theo, Schlock Mercenary

The man of system is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.

— Adam Smith (1759)

There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function.

— Georges Clemenceau (1917)

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

— Oscar Wilde

“But the plans were on display…”“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”“That’s the display department.”“With a flashlight.”“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”“So had the stairs.”“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 341 likes

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."[From the Preface]”― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters 96 likes

“A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that I be forgiven for anything I may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which I may be eligible after the destruction of my body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.”― Roger Zelazny, Creatures of Light and Darkness 51 likes

“Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?”― Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune 28 likes

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”― Simone Weil 27 likes

“I sighed. I hated the maze of bureaucracy with a passion, but I've found the best way to deal with it is to smile and act stupid. That way, no one gets confused.”― Kim Harrison, Dead Witch Walking 22 likes

“Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.”― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land 21 likes

“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially cancelled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir 18 likes

“Confidential matters are not dealt with over the telephone, you'd better come here in person. I cannot leave the house, Do you mean you're ill, Yes, I'm ill, the blind man said after a pause. In that case you ought to call a doctor, a real doctor, quipped the functionary, and, delighted with his own wit, he rang off.The man's insolence was like a slap in the face. Only after some minutes had passed, had he regained enough composure to tell his wife how rudely he had been treated. Then, as if he had discovered something that he should have known a long time ago, he murmured sadly, This is the stuff we're made of, half indifference and half malice.”― José Saramago, Blindness 10 likes

“Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.”― Laurence Gonzales, Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things 9 likes

“If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.”― Hyman G. Rickover 7 likes

“The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.”― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work 6 likes

“In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.”― Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp 6 likes

“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]”― Jerry Pournelle 6 likes

“While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlu, however they've come by this evidence, this is the correct decision.”― China Miéville, The City and the City 3 likes

“It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic--love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.”― Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage 3 likes

“private loans will utilize existing resources and capital far better than government loans. Government loans will waste far more capital and resources than private loans. Government loans, in short, as compared with private loans, will reduce production, not increase it.”― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics 3 likes

“This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid preferential treatment of one person over another - and needing to follow that advice to avoid being swamped by empathy for fellow human beings in distress. The functionary becomes a mixture of Zimbardo's prison guards and the experimenter himself, under siege from without while at the same time following an inflexible rubric set down by those higher up the hierarchical chain, people whose job description makes them responsible, but who in turn see themselves as serving the general public as a non-specific entity and believe or have been told that only strict adherence to a system can produce impartial fairness. Fairness is supposed to be vested in the code: no human can or should make the system fairer by exercising judgement. In other words, the whole thing creates a collective responsibility culminating in a blameless loop. Everyone assumes that it's not their place to take direct personal responsibility for what happens; that level of vested individual power is part of the previous almost feudal version of responsibility. The deindividuation is actually to a certain extent the desired outcome, though its negative consequences are not.”― Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant 2 likes

“The obvious pollution occurring in many places - worst of all, in the planned societies- has encouraged the growth of the environmental movement, which, however, as shown in previous chapters, has an agenda that goes far beyond clean-up and beautification, far beyond the stewardship of nature that is commanded by ancient religious tradition. Embracing the "biospheric vision" in the "spirit of deep ecology", the movement sees human beings as the chief enemy in the struggle on behalf of a deified Nature. The environmental movement, therefore, is the perfect vehicle for population control. It is popular - people do love trees and animals and beautiful scenery - and it is unequivocal in its devotion to reducing human numbers. The environmental agencies of the United Nations, with their chilling blueprints for "demographic transition" and a standardless, undefined but totally planned and controlled "sustainable development", combine the fervor of nature worship with the lack of accountability of an unelected, international bureaucracy.”― Jacqueline Kasun, The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control 2 likes

“But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I'm not the one being arrested.”― Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines 2 likes

“To him, one of the most fascinating historical aspects of governments was their complete disregard for governing. Governments were single-minded and interested only in increasing their control and any governance that came out of the government's actions were purely coincidental. .... The lowest flunky as well as the most powerful bureaucrat was more interested in protecting his sinecure than in helping the citizens who coughed up tax money to pay the government worker's salaries.”― Hank Quense, Zaftan Entrepreneurs

“Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.”― P.D. James, The Lighthouse

“What is all this? Get him out of here, devil take me!” And that one, imagine, smiles and says: “Devil take you? That, in fact, can be done!” And—bang!”― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred 'experience' on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main 'experience' involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation's health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency.”― Christopher Hitchens

“These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. It is this state of affairs which is among the most potent causes for the current world-wide rebellious unrest.”― Hannah Arendt, On Violence 5 likes

“Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it's not the result of venal bureaucrats.(1994) p. 99”― Philip K. Howard, Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America 4 likes

“Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it’s that patterns are repeated.”― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune 4 likes

“The greatest power of bureaucracies is to make the smart act stupid and the good to act evil.”― Raul Ramos y Sanchez, Pancho Land 3 likes

“The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.”― Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line 3 likes

“Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.”― Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama 3 likes

“The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it.…The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise.”― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance 2 likes

“Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.”― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life 2 likes

“One of the key characteristics of an elite corps is its susceptibility to those more powerful than itself. Elite power is naturally attracted to a power hierarchy and fits itself neatly, obediently into the one that promises the most personal benefits. Here is the Achilles’ heel of armies, police and bureaucracies.”― Frank Herbert, The White Plague 2 likes

“For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.”― Mohsin Hamid 2 likes

“But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.”― Manuel De Landa, Thousand Years of Nonlinear History 2 likes

“The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.[…]It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.”― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? 2 likes

“By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc.Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it.”― Philip K. Howard, Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America

“Uniformity in the common law, consisting of broad principles like the "reasonable person" standard, generally permits adjustment for the circumstances. This type of uniform principle is almost synonymous with fairness. Uniform application of a detailed rule, on the other hand, will almost always favor one group over another. p. 34”― Philip K. Howard, Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America

“They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.”― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“For all the scientific evidence we were amassing, many people, both in government and in the citizenry our elected officials are supposedly beholden to, were still refusing to accept that anything out of the ordinary was happening.I wasn't the only voice screaming in the wilderness anymore - but still, not everyone heard the call. In those first few years, it was a long uphill battle to get people to recognize what was happening.”― James Patterson, Zoo

“As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and build walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. A bureaucracy breaks the complexity down into a series of interlocking systems. You don't need to know how the systems fit together, or even what function your bit of the system has, you just perform your bit and the whole machine creaks on.”― Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

“Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite.”― Philip K. Howard, Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America

“Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess defenses against all possible attacks within the rules of the game, yet willing to violate those rules themselves. ... We both know that although it is not listed in the rules, a player can end the game by kicking over the board and throttling his opponent.”― Roger Zelazny, The Dead Man's Brother

“It comforted the great to deal with it and they knew, a man who could reduce any color to grey.”― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait.”― Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed

“This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.”― David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

“I am for joining a free trade zone. The European Union is not such zone, but a zone of raging bureaucracy which stears every hectolitre of wine, and every tone of beef.”― Janusz Korwin-Mikke

“The State is not the hope of the world; it is an institution grounded in the threat of violence, whether via capital punishments or petty bureaucratic intrusions.”― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

MARY MCCARTHY, "The Vita Activa," The New Yorker, Oct. 18, 1958

Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.

WALTER LIPPMANN, Good Society

Remove the document—and you remove the man.

MIKHAIL BULGAKOV, The Master and Margarita

The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.

JOSEPH CONRAD, The Shadow-Line

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

In our time ... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.

CHAIM POTOK, Davita's Harp

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

HONORE DE BALZAC, attributed, The Harper Book of Quotations

Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.

KOLLONTAI ALEXANDRA, La Oposición Obrera

No one comes or stays in the government offices but idlers, incapables, or fools. Thus the mediocrity of French administration has slowly come about. Bureaucracy, made up entirely of petty minds, stands as an obstacle of prosperity of the nation; delays for seven years, by its machinery, the project of a canal which would have stimulated the production of a province; is afraid of everything, prolongs procrastination, and perpetuates the abuses which in turn perpetuate and consolidate itself. Bureaucracy holds all things and the administration itself in leading strings; it stifles men of talent who are bold enough to be independent of it or to enlighten it on its own follies.

HONORE DE BALZAC, Les Employés

Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.

LAURENCE GONZALES, Everyday Survival

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

LAURENCE J. PETER, Peter Prescription

Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.

SIMONE WEIL, "Reflections on War"

However many people complain about the "red tape," it would be sheer illusion to think ... continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices.... The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dillettantism.

MAX WEBER, Economy and Society

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

FRANK HERBERT, Heretics of Dune

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy, but an inevitable complement to it.

JOSEPH A. SCHUMPETER, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

Bureaucracy is, for its detractors, one of the predicaments of modern life and must be examined as what it is, at best, a functional solution to administrative problems and, at worst, an immediate and living threat to the open society.

ALEXANDER STYHRE, The Innovative Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.

HYMAN G. RICKOVER, attributed, Words from the Wise

We have a system laden with rules; elsewhere that is a sure sign that the bureaucracy is aloof from the people, distant from their concerns, and preoccupied with the power and privileges of the bureaucrats--an elaborate, grinding machine that can crush the spirit of any who dare oppose it. We also have a system suffused with participation: advisory boards, citizen groups, neighborhood councils, congressional investigators, crusading journalists, and lawyers serving writs; elsewhere this popular involvement would be taken as evidence that the administrative system is no system at all, but a bungling, jerry-built contraption wallowing in inefficiency and shot through with corruption and favoritism.

JAMES Q. WILSON, Bureaucracy

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

JOHN STUART MILL, attributed, As It Is: An Ode to a Decade of Hidden Issues

Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.

JOSEPH A. SCHUMPETER, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

ALAIN DE BOTTON, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

I hated the maze of bureaucracy with a passion, but I've found the best way to deal with it is to smile and act stupid.

KIM HARRISON, Dead Witch Walking

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it's not the result of venal bureaucrats.

PHILIP K. HOWARD, Death of Common Sense

Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relation with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.

ALAN KEYES, attributed, Public Administration: An Introduction

The greatest power of bureaucracies is to make the smart act stupid and the good to act evil.

RAUL RAMOS Y SANCHEZ, Pancho Land

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general and so all are mutually deceived.

KARL MARX, Collected Works

A bureaucrat is an official who is clothed with power and whom it doesn't fit.

EVAN ESAR, 20,000 Quips & Quotes

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

GORE VIDAL, preface, Sex, Death and Money

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.

BARBARA EHRENREICH, The Worst Years of Our Lives

Guidelines for Bureaucrats: 1) When in charge, ponder. 2) When in trouble, delegate. 3) When in doubt, mumble.

JAMES BOREN, When in Doubt, Mumble: A Bureaucrat's Handbook

A bureaucrat is a politician who has swapped his bunk for a berth.

EVAN ESAR, 20,000 Quips & Quotes

Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose public records to be true.

WILLIAM BLAKE, annotation to Bishop Watson's An Apology for the Bible in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine

Paperwork is the embalming fluid of bureaucracy, maintaining an appearance of life where none exists.

ROBERT MELTZER, attributed, Great Funny Quotes

The knock of bureaucracy on the door of politics announces: Hi, I'm bureaucracy, I'm your replacement. Where bureaucracy takes over, politics dies. Oh, it may seem at first that bureaucracy is a wonderful tool for the one who controls it, but the "tool" soon develops what seems like a mind of its own. And given its characteristic traits--all focused on rational and machine-like operation standards--that turn is inevitable: modern organization replaces human beings.

RALPH P. HUMMEL, The Bureaucratic Experience

It's a poor bureaucrat who can't stall a good idea until even its sponsor is relieved to see it dead and officially buried.

ROBERT C. TOWNSEND, Up the Organization

Bureaucracy is more people doing less things, and taking more time to do them worse.

EVAN ESAR, 20,000 Quips & Quotes

A multitude of little superfluous precautions engender here a population of deputies and sub-officials, each of whom acquits himself with an air of importance and rigorous precision, which seemed to say, though everything is done with much silence, "Make way, I am one of the members of the grand machine of state."

MARQUIS DE CUSTINE, Empire of the Cza

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

Karl Marx

Those who oppose reform will also tell you that under our plan, you won't get to choose your doctor - that some bureaucrat will choose for you. That's also not true.

Barack Obama

There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

Bill Gates

The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

Milton Friedman

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

Milton Friedman

A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.

Harry S. Truman

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Gore Vidal

How can a bureaucrat or a politician be trusted if he says loud words for the sake of Russia's good while trying to take his funds, his money abroad?

Vladimir Putin

A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about.

Newt Gingrich

I'd like to see the health care professionals making decisions, not some bureaucrat in Indianapolis working for an insurance company.

Charles Schumer

I always thought of myself as a kind of literary bureaucrat. And that was never going to be enough for me.

Michael Korda

Nothing symbolizes American strength and vigor more than another unaccountable Washington bureaucrat.

Michelle Malkin

Roy was just another bureaucrat to me, but I realized very soon that without Roy this thing would have died.

Ben Shahn

It is outrageous to know that security procedures are apparently so lax at the Department of Veterans Affairs that a single bureaucrat had the ability to put the personal information of over 26 million Veterans at risk for sale to the highest criminal bidder.

Bob Ney

You can lead a bureaucrat to water, but you can't make him think.

Ric Keller

There is nothing quite so depressing as waking up to face a day when you know that you are going to have to deal with a government office or bureaucrat.

Neal Boortz

I don't want anybody between a doctor and a patient - not an insurance company bureaucrat or a Washington bureaucrat.

John Barrasso

It saddens me when public officials and bureaucrats are criticized for ulterior motives, none of which I have ever found in a government bureaucrat, or when someone personalizes disagreements.

Michael K. Powell

The clear, unmistakable sign of a bureaucrat is somebody who worries about whether he has a window.

Herb Kelleher

I am not aspiring to be a senior bureaucrat. It would limit my freedom.

Alexander Lebedev

For small community banks and credit unions, like those in Central and Northern Wisconsin, the hundreds of new rules will require an estimated 2,260,631 labor hours just for compliance. Those are hours that your local bank or credit union will spend dealing with some Washington bureaucrat instead of focusing on the needs of customers like you.

Sean Duffy

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.

Thomas Sowell

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Franz Kafka

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

Aldous Huxley

I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our devoted attention, not our divided attention.

Kenny Guinn

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Honore de Balzac

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.

P. J. O'Rourke

The answer for healthcare is market incentives, not healthcare by a Godzilla-sized government bureaucracy.

Mitt Romney

Getting things done in this country, if you want to build something, if you want to start a company, it's getting to be virtually impossible with all of the bureaucracy and all of the approvals.

Donald Trump

Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need.

Bill Maher

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

Laurence J. Peter

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

John Stuart Mill

I have an institutional fear of big government. I have an institutional opposition to bureaucracy.

Rush Limbaugh

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.

Hyman Rickover

Misdirected focus on paperwork, on procedures, and on bureaucracy frustrates teachers and fails to give children the education they need.

Christopher Bond

If you have a reputation as a big, stiff bureaucracy, you're stuck.

Jack Welch

Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.

Donald Rumsfeld

The U.N. bureaucracy has grown to elephantine proportions. Now that the Cold War is over, we are asking that elephant to do gymnastics.

Madeleine Albright

This always confuses liberals, that conservatives like the military and don't like the bureaucracy. That's because the military has their guns pointed out and the bureaucracy has them pointed in.

Grover Norquist

Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which will put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill.

Michele Bachmann

I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as stripped down as possible, within reason. It should not be burdened by excess bureaucracy.

Camille Paglia

I really hate bureaucracy and the idea that I'm not a free person.

Paloma Faith

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Mary McCarthy

The real problem is clean up the bureaucracy that people have to deal with to become a citizen the right way. And we must truly secure the border. We can't leave it porous.

Herman Cain

I've never been married and I've no more desire to be married now than I ever have. I hate bureaucracy and I am not religious.

Francesca Annis

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

There's so much in the 21st century that is stymied by bureaucracy and mediocrity and committee.

Benedict Cumberbatch

We must fight against negativeness - especially bureaucracy, corruption and wastefulness.

Nong Duc Manh

We're getting rid of bureaucracy, so that we're releasing time for police officers to be crime fighters and not form writers.

Theresa May

Every year the Federal Government wastes billions of dollars as a result of overpayments of government agencies, misuse of government credit cards, abuse of the Federal entitlement programs, and the mismanagement of the Federal bureaucracy.

Chris Chocola

Today I can announce a raft of reforms that we estimate could save over 2.5 million police hours every year. That's the equivalent of more than 1,200 police officer posts. These reforms are a watershed moment in policing. They show that we really mean business in busting bureaucracy.

Theresa May

Many Americans simply don't want the pinheads in Washington or the various state capitals to be telling us how to live. But we are absolutely going in that direction. President Obama is hell-bent on imposing a bureaucracy that levels all playing fields at great expense in coin and in freedom.

Bill O'Reilly

The challenge is to manage the Web in an open way-not too much bureaucracy, not subject to political or commercial pressures. The U.S. should demonstrate that it is prepared to share control with the world.

Tim Berners-Lee

Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.

Dale Dauten

I've been in the government bureaucracy, I've practiced law, I've done a lot of different things.

John Bolton

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

Jaime Lerner

When I appointed the Minister of the Environment to major cabinet status, the Planning and Priorities committee, the signals that that sent through Ottawa were major, because that's what the bureaucracy understands.

Brian Mulroney

The Sangh Parivar, against which I had been waging a war, misled the people. My opponents used the Election Commission and the bureaucracy to win a political battle.

Lalu Prasad Yadav

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.

Bruce Jackson

Such schemes take money from people who can least afford to spend it to support an unneeded bureaucracy that eats money people thought they were providing for education.

Jesse Helms

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

Eugene McCarthy

What comes after the revolution is inevitably bureaucracy. Whoever wins the revolution builds a bureaucracy.

Sean Parker

The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Mark Steyn

Retaining a sense of control is really important. I like to do things in my own time, and in my own style, so an office with targets and bureaucracy just wouldn't work.

Daniel Tammet

I'm against big bureaucracy in Washington making health care decisions. I just have an aversion to bureaucrats. But it's not just government bureaucrats. I don't like HMO bureaucrats and insurance company bureaucrats either.

Gary Bauer

When I talk to teachers they tell me the things they'd most like from any government are a reduction in bureaucracy, support to help ensure good discipline and a reformed Ofsted.

Michael Gove

German businessmen are overwhelmed by the high cost of doing business. Inflexible rules, enforced by a burgeoning bureaucracy, discourage entrepreneurship.

Suzanne Fields

Given the slow pace of Washington's bureaucracy, policymakers are often busy solving yesterday's problems. This rearview mirror approach afflicts Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress.

Fred Upton

For men, as they get bogged down with responsibilities, commitments, bureaucracy, it is a fantasy just to think of shedding everything literally, walking away with nothing at all, and just hitting the road.

Lee Child

In reality, Afghanistan has functioned as a nation-state for more than two centuries, and its army and bureaucracy reach back to the 19th century.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Too many vital education dollars that should be spent in the classroom are bouncing around in the federal bureaucracy.

Mark Kennedy

NASA's myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation.

Burt Rutan

Health care comprises nearly 20 percent of our national economy, but outdated bureaucracy and red tape have stifled competition and raised costs. As a result, today more than 45 million are without any health coverage.

John Shadegg

If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy; God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.

Hyman Rickover

TSA serves as the operator, administrator and regulator for the nation's transportation security. But in fact, the TSA bureaucracy does all it can to thwart any conversion to a system with more private-sector operations and strong federal oversight and standards. This agency cannot, and should not, do it all.

John Mica

A mayor is a symbol and a public face of what a city bureaucracy provides its citizens.

John Hickenlooper

We have to make bureaucracy sexy.

Jennifer Pahlka

We have this idea of bureaucracy in local government, and it's generally things that we're frustrated at. It doesn't work the way we like it to work.

Jennifer Pahlka

Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.

Alan Keyes

The bureaucracy is not great. I don't think Rick Santorum who is not one for being a big proponent of large bureaucracies would be as enthusiastic a supporter of it.

Harold Ford, Jr.

That is why I strongly believe we should working in Congress to make America a better place to run a business by reducing the costly burdens of bureaucracy and red tape.

Michael K. Simpson

We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.

Andrew Lansley

When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees. As TSA has grown larger, more impersonal, and administratively top-heavy, I believe it is important that airports across the country consider utilizing the opt-out provision provided by law.

John Mica

Other countries, such as Israel, successfully employ behavior detection techniques at their airports, but the bloated, ineffective bureaucracy of TSA has produced another security failure for U.S. transportation systems.

John Mica

We will cut programs, we will try to rein in the size of the bureaucracy. We will bring federal pay scales that have become so exaggerated into line with market rates.

Eric Cantor

I don't want a lot of bureaucracy... I want to run state government the same way we run a campaign - efficient, effective and victorious.

Charlie Crist

Any plan of administration which contemplates a concentrating of responsibility is open to the dangers which follow the creation of a bureaucracy.

Arthur Capper

Well, first, the situation in Afghanistan is much better than it was. But there is no comparison between Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq has a bureaucracy, Iraq has wealth. Iraq has an educated class of people who are positioned to come in and take over.

Peter King

What I've said about compromise, I hope to build a conservative majority so bipartisanship becomes Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government, reduce the bureaucracy, and get America moving again.

Richard Mourdock

We need to remind our core supporters that we have not forgotten their concern with the way our democracy is being replaced by European bureaucracy in so many areas.

John Redwood

Well, just as the Supreme Court follows the election returns, you can bet that the bureaucracy does as well.

James Woolsey

If we overregulate, over control, impose too many burdens and too much bureaucracy - or if we do it across the board, without taking into account the differences among businesses and their relative impact on society - that could make people risk-averse and dampen the entrepreneurial spirit.

Samuel J. Palmisano

Defense leaders should be searching for ways to reform out-of-date procurement processes, to collapse layers of Pentagon bureaucracy, and to restrain the growth in personnel and benefits costs. A critical first step in that process should be to conduct a full Pentagon audit to determine how DOD spends taxpayer dollars.

Pete Hegseth

Temporary teams of trusted people are generally sent to all Departments and to major agencies of government to assist in planning and to acquaint the incoming administration with the civil servants and bureaucracy that will remain in place in the new Administration.

Richard V. Allen

Trapped in the bureaucracy nightmare, real families suffer when the big banks and their servicers force foreclosures. The emotional toll on children packing up their rooms and on parents struggling to find a temporary roof is a deep one.

Sheldon Whitehouse

Just as in policing there is an emphasis on civilians to help with paperwork, we must free up trained and experienced social workers to focus on children, not bureaucracy.

Andy Sawford

We need first of all the reform of our justice system. We need reform of the education system, because of quality of education because of innovation and technology. And we need administrative reform. Too much bureaucracy.

Iveta Radicova

We need to do a top/bottom review of the federal government and for every agency administration bureaucracy that is not called for in the United States Constitution, we have to really ask the question what is its purpose, how many people work there, how much does it cost the taxpayers and what is the value to our society.

Josh Mandel

Publicly, we're saying we're better at fighting terrorism. Privately, we know that the bureaucracy has only gotten worse, since the high-level people are scared of being held responsible for 9/11.

David Hunt

As a bureaucracy becomes more established, it develops its own career structure. It is less dependent, and should be less dependent, on individual personalities. Absolutely no one is indispensable.

John Scarlett

I see my job as being to facilitate the life of clinical researchers so that they can be more productive, and trying to keep the bureaucracy from getting in their way.

Alastair Wood

The way I see it is that love can put an end to this bureaucracy people go through in their relationships. But it can't blind you to the fact that maybe there are bombs, there are problems and the ozone layer is depleting.

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